Evolution Proven False?

This seems as good a time as any to examine the tendency of nut-jobs (religious and otherwise) to grab onto minor controversies within the ranks of their opposition and distort them out of all proportion.

The inspiration for today’s posting comes from Jerry Coyne, who pointed me in the direction of this article in The New York Times, with a further reinforcement from a favorite Youtuber of mine, Coffee With Claire.

The NYT story highlights a case of recently discovered academic fraud within the field of social psychology and the faked data of a Dutch researcher. Claire’s latest YouTube offering reminded me of how it will be misused by anti-science zealots as proof that all of “science” is just one big scam, by invoking the logical fallacy of composition (what is true of the part is necessarily true of the whole). Claire does an excellent take-down of this knuckle dragging God slobberer. His YouTube handle is noimplant4me and his video exemplifying the well worn logical fallacy of composition is here.

Claire rightly notes that noimplant4me fails to mention that in every instance of scientific fraud, it is other scientists who are responsible for policing and catching the miscreants. In the case of noimplant4me, this misuse of logic is aimed at supporting the house of cards that is young earth creationism, but I’ve also seen similar scientific shenanigans leveraged in support of global warning denial.

My noting this tendency will likely have little effect on those who continue to misuse it. That said, I think it is worth mentioning that in this latest example of fraud within the field of social psychology, not much of consequence was really affected. The studies under scrutiny were of the touchy-feely variety and the results, much like religious texts, were manipulated by a man of ignoble character into a framework that fit social convention.

I don’t want to pile on the social psychologists too hard. Sure, most of what they study looks to be about as useful as the beard on my Aunt Bess, but at the end of the day, it’s experts in this field who are responsible for having to make a comprehensible analysis of crazy cultural shit like #atheismplus, so I’ll cut them some slack.

Evolution has not been proven false.

Enjoy.

Weekend Update – Homeland Insecurity

I was unable to stay awake over here in Germany long enough to hear the live capture of the second Boston bomber suspect.  I had spent most of Friday listening in on the live feed of the Boston police department (thru a link on Twitter that led to a live UStream police scanner feed).  I hit the sack about the time the Boston police were shutting down their city wide dragnet.

There were so many reports of suspicious vehicles that I began to wonder if I was really listening to a live feed from the police in Boston, or if they had just put previously recorded conversations from troops stationed at Iraqi Checkpoints on continuous loop.

But I digress.

As I listened to the stream and followed Twitter hashtage #bostonscanner, it was obvious that the authorities were busy trying to disable the live feed.  I started seeing tweets from people watching the UStream via mobile phone apps that were finding their scanner apps shut-down.  There were tweets from the authorities imploring citizens not to retweet the very same information they were BROADCASTING all over the city (as if the suspect would read a Twitter feed instead of just listening directly to the cops themselves if so inclined?) The direct http feed from UStream that I was listening to on my computer never suffered from such blocking.

So let’s do a quick recap here. Homeland Security has spent billions of US taxpayer dollars in an attempt to “make us safe(r)’. We’ve seen countless stories and photos from every Podunk county sheriffs office in the US sporting military grade machinery and weapons.

Buying at all those fancy weapons, and seeing all those highly polished black boots obviously helped loosen the constricted sphincter muscles of a decidedly nervous nation, (while simultaneously enriching the military industrial arms dealers).  But as the incident with the Grand Theft Auto/Boston Bombers scanner feed on UStream shows, our intrepid terrorist warriors overlooked at least one MAJOR GAPING hole in the system.

Somewhere along the way, they forgot to upgrade the police radios of a major American city with police communications gear that can’t be intercepted by any 14 year old kid (or terrorist) with a $99 Radio Shack police scanner.

And to top it all off, this just popped into the picture : Boston Bomber Bin Laden Determined to Attack America.

The FBI and Homeland Security apparently STILL don’t have the manpower to track KNOWN targets of HIGH probability of terrorism or enough money to upgrade Boston police radios? We know they spent bazillions of dollars of Homeland Security money on tanks for the tri-county area of Tuscaloosa (and the like), but not properly following the trail of IDENTIFIED THREATS is WAY over the top.  The FBI, like the town of Waco, must have been lulled into a false sense of serenity as they sat in the cool shadow of their local fertilizer plant.

In the old days (before torture was “enhanced interrogation”) there would probably have been some sort of oversight or review set up to examine these failures, but since Obama decided on a FAIL FORWARD strategy of leadership, that seems highly unlikely.

Enjoy

Accuracy in Media

Independent analysis from FlockThink.

Enjoy

Denigrating the Venerated

It looks like I am not the only blogger willing to risk the backlash of an angry mob by going against custom and speaking ill of the dead. The subject of today’s tirade is the recently departed Margaret Thatcher, who is certainly a much more prominent target for scorn than the lowly Tea Party fundamentalist I took aim at just the other day,

The individual invoking the same type of vituperative invective against Thatcher as I did to Mark Krebs is none other than George Galloway, a long-time politico and current member of the British parliament. A brief pause is in order to allow for a standing ovation for Mr. Galloway!

The tendency to gloss over even the most blatant public vulgarities of our dead on the event of their demise is highly over-rated and counter productive to society. It also gives a warm and fuzzy feeling to the living monsters among us that their legacy (of torture and death) won’t become the highlight reel for their remaining kin and countrymen. Screw that.

Here are a few tasty bits on Thatcher from Mr. Galloway. The whole post is here at this link.

On one of my first political demonstrations – against the Conservative government of Edward Heath (1970-74) the slogan of the day was “Margaret Thatcher- Milk snatcher”. It was the first but not the last time I spat out her name in distaste.

She destroyed more than a third of Britain’s manufacturing capacity, significantly more than Hitler’s Luftwaffe ever achieved.

In the infamous sermon on the Mound in Edinburgh addressing the Church of Scotland she opined that there was “no such thing as society”…”only individuals”

Enjoy

Endangered Species

Don’t let the confluence of the headline picked, juxtaposed against the background of the graphic chosen, mislead you into assuming this is a post reflecting on the diminishing popularity of religion or the shrinking cadre of pedophile priests. Those are not lamentable losses like the actual subject of today’s discourse.

Kissing Your Switches Goodbye

This post is an ode to my love of switches. They will never truly be gone as long as there are those of us dedicated to keeping their memories alive.

If fantasies of wild west shoot outs drove the desires of such notable Americans as Ralphie into an unquenchable lust for a Red Ryder BB gun, it was the lights, bells, buzzers and switches in the early electronics era that propelled many a young lad into a lifelong love of electronics (computers & space).

In my youth we watched the Buck Rogers Channel (/s) and pictured ourselves as the lab-coated technicians tinkering with a fascinating array of electro-mechanical devices, almost always in an attempt to solve the ultimate questions of existence or at a bare minimum, kill the monster. It was a job that could only be accomplished by a highly competent switch-turner or button-pusher. Many a poor laborers son were lured into the promises of a button pushing, back saving future and proceeded to follow an educational path consistent with that scenario. Well I can’t testify as to the veracity of “many”, but it was certainly true in my case, and statistics bear out the rush to math and science in the late fifties and early sixties, so it’s a safe assumption I wasn’t unique in regard to the opportunity presented.

Getting Acquainted With Switches

Some general rules on the hierarchy of switches: The best switches always light up when they are activated. Rocker switches are more high tech than simple lever (pictured above) switches. Big ass switches, like those used on industrial circuit breakers have their own special gravitas. Covered or protected switches like those used in self destruct scenarios are the undeniable Billy Badass of all switches. Highest honors go to those in the latter category which are also highlighted by some form of protection warning graphics, often in the format of yellow police crime scene tape.

Cinematic Law of Computational Equivalency

The more confusing and crowded any randomly assembled melee of blinking lights, assorted switches and hypnotic panel graphics appears on camera, the more powerful the computer. Size matters. It was a precursor to Moore’s Law, only for cinematic computer purposes. Real computers of the day were actual behemoths, affording wide latitude to fertile imaginations Hollywood set designers. As you can see in the photo below (a 50′s look at what a home computer might look like) they were extremely complicated looking bits of steampunk. Is that a ships steering wheel in the lower left, or is there a ’57 Chevy missing it’s steering wheel out there somewhere? And why is that steering wheel looking thingamabob there in the first place? If I didn’t know any better I’d suspect this was a contemporary photo of the logistics control room of a Carnival Cruise liner.

Switch History in the Twentieth Century

In the sixties era, back when Siri was just as much a fantasy as Roomba Rosie the talking robot maid on The Jetsons, switches ruled the day.

The lowly electric switch, born in the century of Edison’s light bulb, dominated the control circuit market in the century to follow. Reconstituted in many elaborate forms over the next half century, the magnetic control contact relays of the 1960′s Bell telephone system showcased the epitome of mechanical switch integration into our high tech lifestyles.

Even as the computer era continued to encroach upon us, the era of the switch looked keen to prosper into the next generation. A quick glance at the first home computer ever offered for sale, the Altair 8800, belies the fact that switches would soon be going the way of the dinosaurs.

It’s kind of hard to imagine what a big deal just having a keyboard was for people back in the late 1970′s. From the introduction of the Altair in 1975 to the introduction of keyboards was a short few years. It was a net wash for the fate of switches, with the confusing array of programming switches shown above merely shifted to a more convenient arrangement in the form of a QWERTY keyboard. Keyboards actually pumped a shot of adrenaline into the product life cycle of switches, but they’re now in rapid decline. Their ghosts still haunt the virtual QWERTY keyboard layout on your smart devices.

The Coming End for my little Friends

This ultimately brings me around to the leap of technology that is ultimately killing my beloved switches. The ubiquitous cheap ability to put an entire computer in the place a single mechanical switch and then use it for something inane like simple on/off touch control (soft switching).

I’m reasonably certain there will be at least a few switches that last long enough for my aging bony fingers to cling to, but I would bet that a baby born today won’t have any memory of switches by the time he/she gets old enough to scope out the most popular hair care products in his/her peer group.

The future youth of the world need only know one switch, and that isn’t even assured. Which one? The power switch. After that you’ll just be talking to your devices. Are you ready? For what it’s worth, Siri and Google Voice already have me enunciating like a sixth grade English student as I valiantly attempt to get my device to comprehend my southern infected Yankee dialect. The fact that it works more often than not already, has given me the confidence to broadcast this glimpse into the immediate future as a near certainty and not just a rambling delusional vision of the sort offered by Harold Camping.

Enjoy